Youth with same-sex desire undergo a process of narrative engagement as they construct configurations of identity that provide meaning and coherence with available sexual taxonomies. This article presents a theoretical analysis and four case studies centering on the relationship among context, desire, and identity for youth with same-sex desire.…

In this study, we examine a large set of student responses to a constructed-response geometry item on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) administered in 1992 and 1996. The item asks students to name the similarities and differences between a parallelogram and a rectangle of equal area presented side by side on a grid. Through…

In 2005, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT) stirred the higher education world with the announcement of a new classification for institutions that engage with community. The classification, community engagement, is the first in a set of planned classification schemes resulting from the foundation's reexamination of the…

The current study evaluated the relative roles of conceptual knowledge and executive control on the development of "categorical flexibility," the ability to switch between simultaneously available but conflicting categorical representations of an object. Experiment 1 assessed conceptual knowledge and executive control together; Experiment 2…

Categorical perception, demonstrated as reduced discrimination of within-category relative to between-category differences in stimuli, has been found in a variety of perceptual domains in adults. To examine the development of categorical perception in the domain of facial expression processing, we used behavioral and event-related potential (ERP)…

Although curriculum orientations are widely discussed in educational literature, the extent to which teachers and other educational specialists in the United States hold these curriculum orientations is neither well documented nor well known. The relationships between a teacher's beliefs and the five dominant curriculum orientations (Academic…

The purpose of this brief report was to develop a typology of relational turning point events between college teachers and students. Participants were 640 undergraduates who were asked whether they could recall a turning point with a teacher, and if so, to report the turning point event in detail. Analysis of the data yielded 6 large categories of…

For the majority of those living in developing countries (especially in the rural areas) sharing may be the only means of obtaining access to IT. Oddly, however, no-one has viewed "IT for development" specifically from this point of view for the Internet, computers and mobile phones. A good beginning, it seems to me, is to make an analytical…

Because of their high prevalence and their negative long-term consequences, child anxiety disorders have become an important focus of interest. Whether pathological anxiety and normal fear are similar processes continues to be controversial. Comparative studies of child anxiety disorders are scarce, but there is some support for the current…

We investigated probabilistic cues to grammatical category (noun vs. verb) in English orthography. These cues are located in both the beginnings and endings of words--as identified in our large-scale corpus analysis. Experiment 1 tested participants' sensitivity to beginning and ending cues while making speeded grammatical classifications.…

Many tests classify each examinee into one of multiple performance levels on the basis of a combination of multiple-choice (MC) and constructed-response (CR) items. This study introduces a two-stage scoring method that identifies examinees whose MC scores place them near a cut point, advising scorers on which examinees will be most affected by…

In this commentary, the author points out few issues, one being that there are models mislabeled as diagnostic, which deal with linear decompositions of item difficulties rather than estimating multidimensional skill variables. The author discusses the issue that there are many new names for essentially well-known models for multiple simultaneous…

Review of 78 evaluations for 29 young children examined practices used in assessment of autism spectrum disorders in three settings: public schools, developmental disabilities eligibility determinations, and our hospital-based early childhood mental health program. While similar rates of classification of autism spectrum disorders were found…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify the current trends in and future prospects for distance education in primary, secondary, and higher education in China. Design/methodology/approach: This article reviews relevant literature and cases, and explores the current situation of distance education in China. Findings: The use of…

An undergraduate organic chemistry experiment demonstrating real-life application of GC-MS to arson accelerant identification is described. Students are given the task of comparing a sample recovered from a "crime scene" to that from a "suspect's clothing". Accelerants subjected to different conditions are recovered using a quick and simple…